Results and products 2004-2006
Between July 2004 and Dec. 2006, the S project has been developed at PIK by N. Botta, C. Ionescu, C. Linstead and R. Klein with contributions from J. Gerlach (Fraunhofer-Institut für Rechnerarchitektur und Softwaretechnik FIRST, Berlin) and A. Priesnitz (Computing Science, Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden). Two main research lines have lead to:
- A simple model of parallel computations.
- A computational framework for building fast, distributed, parallel applications.
The model of parallel BSP (bulk synchronous parallel) computations has been implemented as an Haskell module to describe, specify, derive and test-implement parallel, distributed relation-based algorithms. It is a simple parallel-program simulator that can be run with any Haskell interpreter, for instance with HUGS.
The computational framework has been developed as collections of software components (SC) implemented in C++. It is structured in application-independent and application-dependent components and relies on few external libraries, among others MPI. It supports the semi-automatic parallelization of stencil-based, user-defined sequential algorithms.
These achievements have been documented in reports, papers and in a number of lectures, please see Publications and Lectures. The first release of the SC framework has been published under GPL (GNU Public License) in January 2007. It can be downloaded from here. Read access to the SC repository is available, together with full versioning information and selective downloads, on PIK machines under http://pc61.pik-potsdam.de/websvn/.
